Starting fresh

So let’s say that I was dropped into 2013 bare-assed, sent forward in time from 1993 to start my life anew.  Never owned a computer, a cell phone, so much as a pager – my personal technology consists of a boom box and a Walkman, plus a handheld tape recorder bought in a Twin Peaks frenzy and untouched for a couple of years.  How then shall we set up this prior regeneration with the necessities of life?

This thought experiment began when we were staying at a friend’s place in San Francisco – we clocked the better part of a couple of weeks in there over the last few months, and began thinking about whether we could live there.  It’s a one bedroom condo in a high-rise with a breathtaking view of downtown, perfectly located for transit access, just a dream of a pied a terre…so could we make it work?  And the first casualty was bookcases, because we have half a dozen sagging under the weight of thirty years’ worth of books…and my first thought was Kindle.

So that’s the beginning: the books have to be digital.  Which in turn means all the media needs to be digital.  The obvious solution at this point is the one I have: Kindle for books and Apple for music and video, both conveyed via AppleTV to the big screen.  The only thing is, this sort of ties you into Amazon and Apple’s respective ecosystems.  It’s less a problem for music as most of the Apple stuff is .m4a now and you can still acquire and use other unlocked media forms (.mp3) with iDevices (and even have them synced with iTunes Match), and it’s less a problem for books as the Kindle format has apps for every major platform in addition to its own devices.

But streaming is an issue.  I can’t have my media reliant on streaming – Spotify or Pandora, for instance, are right out – because mobile data is expensive and streaming will kill battery life.  And as far as I can tell, for movies, anything I want to buy and keep locally is going to mean Apple, unless I want to piece together some combination of Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.  Which I can probably sort out…eventually.  But if I want that copy of Avengers, it looks like the simplest route is still iTunes.  So yeah, ultimately, that’s the choice: all in on the Apple system.

Now, what to do for actual devices?  The first question for me is: laptop vs desktop?  If you assume the Mac mini will be connected to the TV for the few times it will be used, it’s no contest – the tricked-out high-speed Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB internal drive is $900, whereas the higher-end 11″ MacBook Air bumped up to 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB drive is $1500. Bad arithmetic, when the Mac is meant to serve as the central media repository as much as an actual working computer.  That $600 difference will let you buy a 16 GB retina-display iPad with LTE built in…and just enough left over for a low-end Kindle, suitable for carrying and reading.

Because in the end, there’s no getting around an iPhone. In 2013, the one thing I can’t work around is portable audio – not just music but podcasts.  Getting podcasts on the run rules out the iPod, and portable audio rules out even the smallest iPad.  The iPhone has to be there to split the difference and serve as the all-everything portable device, with the Kindle in reserve for ease of reading (and as the focus of magazine subscriptions).  And once you have the iPhone, it doesn’t make as much sense to buy an iPad mini as the sole portable device, not yet anyway: the screen’s not retina yet, and the input isn’t substantially better than a phone.  If you’re actually typing on glass, you need the full-sized iPad.

So there it is: iPhone, Kindle, full-size iPad with LTE, and a Mac mini at home to drive it all.  Amazingly, this is exactly what I have and use right now…well, and the work laptop.  Technically if you want to take everything of work’s away, my loadout is the Mac mini, the iPad, the Kindle, and the MOTOFONE F3.  Which begs the question of whether you could get by if you could somehow get a phone that only functioned to make calls and serve LTE wirelessly to your tablet…but that’s another story.

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